Joan Vinckeboons (1617–70) was a Dutch cartographer and engraver born into a family of artists of Flemish origin. He was employed by the Dutch West India Company and for more than 30 years produced maps for use by Dutch mercantile and military shipping. He was a business partner of Joan Blaeu, one of the most important map and atlas publishers of the day. Vinckeboons drew a series of 200 manuscript maps that were used in the production of atlases, including Blaeu’s Atlas Maior. This 1639 pen-and-ink and watercolor ...

Dated at approximately 1540, this map, a Mexican pictorial document with writing in Spanish and Nahuatl, relates to a lawsuit concerning the estate of Don Carlos Ometochtli Chichimecatecotl, an Aztec lord and one of the many sons of Nezahualpilli, ruler of Texcoco. Don Carlos was charged with heresy and publicly executed by the Spanish authorities on November 30, 1539. Litigation began on December 31, 1540, when a man identified as Pedro de Vergara petitioned the Inquisition to return to him certain fruit trees taken from the property of Don Carlos ...

Kitāb al-kharāj (Book of taxation)is a classic text on fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), written by Abū Yusūf Yaʿqūb Ibrāhīm al-Anṣārī al-Kūfī (died 798; 182 A.H.) at the request of the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (763 or 766-809). Abū Yusūf was the most famous student of Abū Ḥanīfa and along with his illustrious teacher is considered one of the founders of the Ḥanafī school of law. In the introduction to the book, Abū Yusūf describes how the caliph asked him to write a work treating the collection of al-kharāj (the ...

This deed of bargain and sale, dated March 10, 1613, records William Shakespeare's purchase of a gatehouse in the Blackfriars district of London, from Henry Walker, citizen and minstrel of London. Shakespeare paid £80 of the £140 selling price up front, and on the day after the conveyance he mortgaged the remaining £60 back to Walker. William Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, and John Jackson and John Heminge, gentlemen, acted as trustees in Shakespeare's interest. They also were in charge of the sale of the property following ...

The final concord between William Shakespeare and Hercules Underhill is the confirming title to Shakespeare's New Place house in Stratford-upon-Avon, signed Michaelmas 1602. Shakespeare originally purchased New Place in May 1597 from William Underhill. Underhill was poisoned two months later by Fulke Underhill, his oldest son and heir, who was hanged for the crime in 1599. When Hercules Underhill, Fulke's younger brother, came of age, Shakespeare protected his title to New Place by paying him to reconfirm the purchase. As was the custom, three copies of the final ...

This document is an enclosure originally submitted by Henry Lee IV to Florida territorial judge Augustus Brevoort Woodward in September 1824. Lee sought Woodward’s assistance in securing claim to property purchased by his father, General Henry Lee, from Thomas Brown in 1817. On March 1, 1783, several “Kings and Warriors” representing Upper Creek, Lower Creek, and Seminole towns affixed their names and family marks to a document granting Thomas Brown, a British superintendent of Indian affairs, substantial territory west of Saint Augustine in what was then British East Florida ...

This large, detailed, map is from the collection of the Panama Canal Zone Library, which was transferred to the Library of Congress in 1978. This collection contains various maps, plans, and diagrams detailing the history of Panama and the construction of the Panama Canal over the ten-year period of 1904 to 1914. According to a note on the map, the “map shows the land in the Canal Zone that has been set apart for all Governmental purposes in the Canal Zone, to date, and whether the land belongs to the ...

The Deed of Settlement and Royal Charter of Incorporation of the South Australian Company is a key document in South Australia's history: it highlights the difference between the manner in which South Australia was established and populated and the foundation of other Australian colonies as penal settlements. It also records British economic expansionism at its peak and illustrates the interconnections between British business interests, the Colonial Office, and social and evangelical activists. In 1834, the British Parliament passed the South Australia Act, which empowered the government to establish and ...

The Spanish Land Grants were claims filed to prove ownership of land after the transfer, in 1821, of the territory of Florida to the United States. Starting in 1790, Spain offered land grants to encourage settlement in the sparsely populated and vulnerable Florida colony. When the United States assumed control of the territory, it agreed to honor any valid land grants. Residents had to prove the validity of their grants through documentation and testimonials in dossiers filed with the U.S. government. Claims either were confirmed (found to be valid ...

This exceptionally valuable file contains 28 separate petitions from different leaders and towns of the Marquesado del Valle, protesting seizures of lands and sugar mills by Hernán Cortés, the first marquess. The Marquesado comprised the present-day Mexican state of Morelos as well as parts of the states of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Mexico. The great sugar plantations that Cortés created were organized by renting, buying, or seizing gardens, fields, and other lands that had belonged to the caciques (Indian nobles), towns, and districts since time immemorial. Throughout the 16th century, the ...

The Techialoyan Codex of Cuajimalpa is one of the Techialoyan codices, the generic name for a group of documents produced by the same team of people in a wide area of central Mexico, mostly from 1685 to 1703. The codex describes a meeting of the notables of the town of San Pedro Cuajimalpa, held to confirm the territorial limits of the town, the places it included, its districts, and its tributary towns. The object of this ceremony, a fusion of the ancient Mesoamerican and European cultural practices, was to legitimate ...

This work is a reprint of a cadastral map, originally produced around 1630–31, showing land ownership in central Edo (Tokyo). The original map is considered the oldest and most accurate extant plan of the city, and multiple reproductions of it were made until the end of the Edo period (1603–1868). The map has several defining features, one of which is that all text labels read in the same direction, in the style of modern maps. It also includes pictorial representations of significant areas such as Edo Castle, the ...